Saturday, September 17, 2011

It's been a busy week for both kids and teachers! We managed to finish our unit on Graphing Data with a final look at Line Plotting. Third graders have not been exposed to this graph before so I tried to come up with several line plotting ideas to help them gain experience with creating them and analyzing results. This idea was their favorite. I was inspired by the game show, A Minute to Win It and decided to have my students try building the tallest pattern block tower they could in a minute. We would then count the blocks used by each group and graph/analzye the result.Be forewarned: This activity also ended up being a reteach of using self control and level 2 voices! It was great fun though and kids did end up understanding this type of graph having been involved in making one themselves!

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comments:

Could you explain a little more about "counting" the blocks for the data. Did you mean their fractional value or did you simply count how many of each and put an "X" representing each time? I love this idea and would like to incorporate it into my classroom.